Local history: Mayo, William Bald and the Bog Commission

By Tom Gillespie

PRIOR to May 22, 1810, when engineer William Bald was appointed to the Bog Commission, a government appointed body set to gather reliable information and to make practical recommendations that would enable the government of the day to take appropriate measures to ‘improve’ the conditions of Ireland, Bald was already working on a survey and map of Co. Mayo.

The map was commissioned by the Mayo Grand Jury in 1809 and turned over to them in 1813, but it was not published until 1815.

In the case of the Bog Commission, it was information collected by qualified engineers and surveyors while surveying the bogs of Ireland over a number of years.

The Bog Commission was set up in 1809 to ascertain the nature and extent of the bogs of Ireland, and the practicality of converting them in to agricultural land.

Clifden born author Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill, in her 2006 book ‘Alexander Nimmo and The Western District’, described how Bald made four models of parts of Mayo.

One ‘contained 200 square miles; the perpendicular and horizontal scales (were) four inches to the English mile’, showing ‘every road, driblet, lake, wood, town, etc.’. This was given to the museums in Trinity College Dublin.

He also made a model of Clare Island, which was given to the Royal Academy, and another of Achill Island, ‘the largest on the coast of Ireland’.

For the Bog Commission, he surveyed three large districts in Co. Mayo: (1) the bogs between Clew Bay and Castlebar, (2) those east of Castlebar and running into Co. Sligo and Roscommon, and (3) the bogs between Clew Bay and Killary Harbour and Lough Mask.

For all of these Bald outlined the individual bogs, suggested ways of draining them and proposed new roads to facilitate their cultivation.

The maps accompanying Bald’s reports also show a number of roads running through the centre of Mayo.

Many of these had been constructed over the previous 30 years and, bearing in mind what Richard Griffith, another engineer with the Bog Commission, had to say regarding the conditions of the roads in Mayo, it seems safe to assume that almost all of these would benefit from the attention of a professional engineer.

In the southwest oft the county, south of Clew Bay, there were roads connecting Westport to Louisburgh and to the head of Killary Harbour.

From Louisburgh a road ran to the village of Cross at Cross lough on the coast, and there were several branch roads running from it to the east and west.

The Westport to Killary road came along the south bank of the Erriff River and entered Killary at Glenanane. There were no roads on the north or south shores of Killary Harbour, although the presence of settlements or bailes would indicate that there might well have been tracks: the village of Bundorragha would appear to be accessible only by sea.

Bald suggested new roads and improvements to existing roads in all his districts and he outlined the direction these should take. He also suggested that efforts be made to improve the fishery along the coast, where there was ‘remarkable finishing bands of cod and ling’.

Killary Harbour, he pointed out, was known to be one of the best fisheries for gearing on the west coast and was considered deep enough to accommodate ‘a first-rate man-of-war’.

The construction of new roads here would greatly improve the area and ‘enable the inhabitants to send their produce to the market towns of Westport, Castlebar and Ballinrobe’.

Bald also held then opinion that the bog could be easily reclaimed and cultivated. The rise in population and the practice of subdivision had created a demand for additional land and he saw no difficulty in attracting tenants to occupy and cultivate the reclaimed bogs.

He compared the bogs to new colonies: ‘The reclaimed bogs in Ireland would have all the advantages of new colonies, both as to room and food in abundance, and none of their difficulties in distance and transport’.

And in areas where the bog was on high land, too high for the cultivation of grain, he suggested that it be fenced off and planted with trees.

The reports submitted to the Bog Commission by all the engineers were positive in their findings and practical in their recommendations for future developments.

Staying sure to their brief, they gave a claret picture of the geography of the counties and the infrastructure that existed at the time.

However, with the exception of Alexander Nimmo, they said little about the people, except to point out that the tenants were extremely poor and that the landowners lacked the capital to finance the improvement works as outlined in their reports.

While conducting their surveys and drawing up their maps, the engineers would have informed the landowners of their intended recommendations and this may have raised expectations among them that some form of government aid would be made available for bog reclamation.

But any hope of the introduction of state funds to aid the developments of the west was soon crushed with the commission’s recommendations, in the final report in 1814, that the development of the Irish bogs should be left to private enterprise.

This resulted in no action being taken by the government to implement any of the suggestions put forward in the engineers’ reports and their findings were in danger of being pushed aside only to gather dust in some back room in Dublin Castle.

Some of the reports, however, were independently published, including one of Nimmo’s Kerry reports in 1818, and these later became blueprints for future developments in these regions.

Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill is the author of four books - ‘History of Clifden 1810-1860’, 'Beyond The Twelve Bens: A history off Clifden and District 1860-1923’, ‘Patient Endurance: The Great Famine in Connemara’, and ‘History of Kylemore Castle and Abbey’ as well as numerous articles on the history of Connemara.